by Mick Herron
She’d not been able to raise Louisa or Marcus, but had talked to Catherine, who’d told her the alarms were false; no terrorist bombs were expected … It had sounded like a bomb to her though, if a small one.
One breath after another, at least one of which was a sigh. Arkady Pashkin wasn’t who he said he was, and had two thugs in tow. Shirley had no weapon, but she’d put people on the floor with her bare hands before now. Come to think of it, that’s why she was in Slough House in the first place.
It didn’t matter that her legs were soup, or that she was less than halfway up. The City was coming apart, and that seemed to be Pashkin’s plan. So she wasn’t going to lie here panting while Guy and Longridge stopped it by themselves. Not if a ticket back to Regent’s Park was involved.
Grinding her teeth, she took the next flight.
From way above her, more noise. It might have been a gunshot.
The sixty-fifth. de Koenig. The diamond merchant’s. Its outer room was kitted out on a desert theme, with silks hanging off the walls and a clutch of palms forming a centrepiece, though these had been bent and torn by the blast that had shaken the floor twelve storeys up. Smoke still hugged the ceiling, and any furniture not fixed into place was scattered against the right-hand side of the room. Midway along the facing wall a metal door hung off its hinges.
“They’re gone,” she said.
“Never assume.” Marcus went through the metal door the same way he’d entered the suite: every direction covered. Louisa followed.
It had been a secure room, lined with narrow deposit boxes, a good dozen of which had been blown open. From the floor glinted a shard of broken glass, which wasn’t broken glass, Louisa realised—Jesus, it was a diamond, the size of a fingernail.
And Piotr too, a chunk of his head removed by a bullet, and smeared on the nearest wall.
“Pashkin’s travelling light,” Marcus said.
“He must be on the stairs.”
“So let’s go.”
They ran for the stairwell again, but at the firedoor Louisa paused. “He could be on any floor.”
“He wants out. Once the scare’s over, it won’t be so easy.”
He had to bend into her ear to speak. The scare wasn’t over yet, though the alarm seemed to be winding down, as if running on a tired battery.
Louisa checked her phone. “Still no good,” she said. “And Webb’s bleeding out for all we know. I’ve got to find an outside line.”
He said, “Okay. I’ll keep going.”
“Shoot straight,” Louisa said.
Marcus continued down the neverending stairs, and Louisa went back into de Koenig’s.
“You were a Kremlin brain.”
“Yes. Until I became, instead, a Moscow cipher clerk. With just enough of the right sort of information to be granted entry into your Jerusalem.”
“You invented Popov, who we knew was a legend. So we thought the cicadas were a legend too, but they were real. Why’d you bring them to Upshott?”
“They had to be somewhere,” Katinsky said. “Once Moscow fell apart. Besides, they were sleepers, and where better to sleep?”
“They were agents of influence.”
“They were bright talented people, with access to people with access, and they reached right into the heart of the establishment. It would have made for an interesting game, if it hadn’t come to a premature end.”
“You mean if you hadn’t lost, you might have won,” River said. “Do they even know? About each other, I mean?”
Katinsky laughed. He laughed so hard he started to wheeze and had to put a hand up as if instructing River to stop right there, put everything on hold. It was the hand that held his iPhone. The other remained out of River’s view.
At length he said, “On the whole, I think not. Though they may have suspicions.”
River said, “All these years, and you decided to come back to life. There’s got to be a reason for that. You’re dying, aren’t you?”
“Liver cancer.”
“That’s one of the painful ones. Too bad.”
“Thank you. You liked the girl, didn’t you? Young Kelly Tropper. I mean, I know you screwed her, but it went beyond business, didn’t it? Spies screw girls when they’re called upon to do so, and young men screw girls when the opportunity presents. Which were you when you bedded her, Walker?”
“Did it bother you, sending her out to die?”
“Sending her? She’d say it was her own idea.”
“I’m sure she thought so. Are you really waiting for a call?”
“I might be. Or I might be waiting to make one.”
“It’s over, you know.”
“It was over a long time ago,” Katinsky said. “But that’s the thing about dying. It encourages you to tidy up.”
“To settle scores,” River said.
“I prefer to think of it as redressing a balance. You don’t think this is about ideology, do you?”
“Well, I don’t think it’s about a heist. Why Upshott?”
“You already asked.”
“You didn’t answer. Nothing you’ve done’s been accidental. You came here for a reason.”
The sun was trying to clear the belltower, and given time and patience, would succeed. It always had done before. Behind them, gravestones were soaking in warmth, but the bench remained in shadow. Katinsky gave the impression that this was where he belonged. For all his solidity, River half-expected him to evaporate once the sun’s rays touched him.
“Why do you think?”
No, River thought; it wasn’t his grandfather the man reminded him of. It was Jackson Lamb.
He said, “It’s England.”
“Oh come on. So is Birmingham. So is Crewe.”
“Picture postcard England. Medieval church, village pub, village green. You wanted to park your network at the heart of a vision of rural England.”
Like a grudging tutor, Katinsky nodded. “Maybe. What else?”
River said, “When you chose it, it had a military base. Most of the town existed just to serve it. There was nothing else here.”
“A small place with no proper existence … Why would the man who invented Alexander Popov choose such a place, I wonder?”
A passing wind crawled through the neatly-trimmed grass, shaking the spray of daffodils in a tin vase by a headstone. For no reason he could think of, River remembered the O.B., his grandfather, reaching with a twig to rescue a beetle from a burning log in his grate. And then the memory fizzed and vanished, the way the beetle itself had popped when the fire swallowed it. But the connection had been made. Here in the quiet churchyard, River recalled a distant conflagration.
“ZT/53235,” he said.
Katinsky said nothing. But his eyes answered yes.
“That’s where you’re from,” River said, and even as he spoke, Katinsky’s words, I prefer to think of it as redressing a balance, swam into his mind, and despite the encroaching sunshine it grew colder on their bench.
Louisa found a phone; called emergency services, but couldn’t get through—what the hell was going on? Through the window, traces of black smoke spread inkily across the sky. Way down below, London was burning.
She called Slough House and filled Catherine in.
“He was still alive when you left him?”
“He was breathing. I’m not a doctor.”
She was having second thoughts about having left Webb on his own. Or not even on his own: the other Russian was there too. Also in pain, though that was of less consequence to her.
“Where’s Pashkin now?”
“On his way down, I imagine. With Marcus in hot pursuit.”
“I hope he’s careful.”
“I hope he kills the bastard.”
“I hope the bastard doesn’t kill him first. Or the others.”
Roderick Ho and Shirley Dander were on the scene too.
“It’s chaos out there, Louisa. God knows when you’ll see reinforcements.”
&nb
sp; “We need medics first.”
“I’ll get a chopper sent.”
“Oh, shit,” said Louisa.
The roof.
“ZT/53235,” said River. “That’s where you’re from.”
“No legend worth the name springs from virgin soil. I gave Popov my own past, yes.”
“So you … you must have been a child.”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it? But apparently I carry the memory within.” He grimaced. “It wasn’t a healthy town to be born in. Even before you burned it to the ground.”
“Your own government destroyed it,” River said. “Because they thought there was a spy there. But there wasn’t. There never was. The town was destroyed for no reason.”
“There are always reasons,” the Russian said. “The spy wasn’t real, but the evidence was. That’s how the mirror world works, Walker. Your service wasn’t able to plant a spy there because security was too tight. So it did the next best thing, and planted evidence to suggest a spy. So the government did what governments do, and destroyed the town. What your Service would now call a result. Back then, they called it a victory.”
“It was all a long time ago,” said River, as if that meant anything now, or ever had.
“I came from a place that epitomised the Soviet world in English eyes,” said Katinsky. “And it was destroyed by fire. So here I am, in a place that epitomises England to the rest of the world. Tell me. What happens next?”
River moved at exactly the moment Katinsky revealed what his right hand held, and River pulled back but not fast enough. Katinsky caught his elbow with the Taser, and the force of the voltage threw him onto the path.
Katinsky stood. “I told you Pashkin had various things I needed. Where do you think I got this from?” Bending, he zapped River again. Sparks burst and the world swam red and black. “A source of plastic explosives was another. Being a career criminal opens all sorts of doors. Knows no borders, you might say.”
“There was no bomb,” River managed to squeak.
“No. The plane was a decoy, for Pashkin’s benefit. The plastic’s still here. All around us.”
He meant the gravestones, River thought dizzily.
Then: No.
He meant the whole village.
Katinsky said, “Each of the cicadas has enough to create one large bomb. And each has been told where to plant it. It’s the instruction they’ve been waiting for for years. Now they know why they were dispatched to Upshott. It was to be in place to destroy an enemy.”
“You’re mad. They won’t have done it.”
“I gave them everything,” he said. “Their identities, their start in life. And for more than twenty years they’ve been waiting, Walker. Waiting for the call that will activate them. That’s what cicadas do. They wake up and sing.”
“Even if they’ve planted these bombs. What good will it do?”
“I told you. It will redress a balance. And demonstrate that history never forgives.”
“You’re absolutely fucking insane.”
“You’re not so confident, then? That they won’t do it?”
River had been hoarding strength. All that energy that fizzed through his body, all of it that hadn’t been dissipated by the longest night of his life, was being summoned, and in a second he’d leap to his feet. Strange that he still felt fluid and helpless. “They’re not who you think. Not any more. They’ve been here too long.”
“We’ll see.” He held up the iPhone. “I’ll do a ring-round.”
“You’re going to ask them?”
Katinsky laughed and took a step back. “No, boy,” he said. “I’ll talk to the bombs. What, you think they’re attached to a fuse? They detonate remotely. Like this.”
He pressed numbers.
Webb was breathing, and his eyelids fluttered as Louisa bent over him. “Don’t die,” she said. He didn’t react. “Prick,” she added. He didn’t react to that, either.
Kyril wasn’t there. He’d handily left a trail of blood, though.
Still panting, she followed it. He’d made for the stairwell, but had gone up, not down. It must have been slow progress, judging by the blood. And came to an end two landings up, where he lay slumped against the wall, his face twisted into an agonized scribble.
“Making a run for it?”
“Bitch.”
It was a scratchy whisper. It didn’t seem likely he’d be shouting any warnings.
“He’s on the roof, isn’t he? You’ve got a chopper coming.”
But Kyril rolled his eyes and said no more.
He carried no weapon. If Pashkin was up there, she’d be a sitting duck. So she went through the last door carefully, or tried to. But the wind caught it and slammed it open.
Three hundred metres above London’s streets, there was a fair lick of breeze.
The mast was on the opposite side of the roof: a graceful thin blade reaching up into the blue. Between here and there was a shanty-like collection of air-con vents, aerial casings, lightning rods and what looked like concrete stylings of garden sheds, housing lift machinery or other staircases. Oddly seedy for a highpomp building, but most slick operations had their grimy underside: this is what was going through her mind when a bullet chipped the door behind her.
She rolled behind a ship’s funnel-shaped vent and scrambled to a sitting position.
“Louisa?”
Pashkin. He had to shout to be heard up here, higher than the birds.
“Nowhere to go, Pashkin,” she shouted back. “The cavalry are coming.”
He was behind one of the shed-structures lining the building’s west side, it sounded like. The east side dropped a level to a flatter expanse, where a helicopter could land, but hadn’t yet. To left and right she saw no city, only sky, faintly smudged by oily smoke. A ludicrously thin railing marked the edge of the roof. If that was all there was to keep her from pitching into the void, she hoped the wind didn’t pick up.
“Yes,” he shouted back. “I’ve booked a ride. Have you got a gun, Louisa?”
“Of course I bloody have.”
“Perhaps I’ll come and take it from you.”
It seemed she was out of range of his signal blocker out here, because her phone rang.
“Kind of busy.”
“I sent for an air-ambulance. They say there’s already one on the way. Louisa—”
“Way ahead of you.”
Why arrange for your own pilot when you could hijack an air ambulance?
He was behind one of those shed structures, unless he wasn’t. Might even be right behind this vent, crawling round to her. Part of her hoped so.
Louisa wasn’t stupid. She’d brought the fireaxe with her.
“Louisa? Go back inside. Close the door. I’ll be gone in a few minutes. No harm, no foul, isn’t that what they say?”
“Not in this country they don’t.”
She hoped her voice sounded steady. A thin wisp of cloud above was scudding so fast it was making her dizzy. If she closed her eyes, she might roll to that railing, and beyond.
“Because otherwise, I’ll have to kill you.”
“Like you had to kill Min?”
“Well, you I’ll shoot. But the outcome will be the same, yes.”
Oh Christ, she thought. Crouching with her back to an air-con vent atop the City’s tallest building while a well-dressed gangster cracked wise. I’m in Die Hard.
“Louisa?”
He sounded nearer, but it was hard to tell. Last night, she’d have taken him with pepper spray and plasti-cuffs, and all this would have been over. But bloody Marcus had interfered so here she was instead, way above London, and Pashkin had a gun.
And what did I think I was doing, racing up here unarmed?
Though the answer was no further away than her memories of Min, whom this bastard had murdered for an armful of diamonds.
She thought she could hear a helicopter.
Choices, choices. She could do as he’d said, and head back in to safety
. Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t shoot her in the back before hijacking the helicopter. On the streets below, all was chaos. He’d force it down in Hyde Park, disappear among the crowds. Think! She thought. Or rather, didn’t think: she stood instead, and launched herself across the gap between where she’d been crouching and the next place of shelter, a sturdy chunk of concrete inside which lift machinery silently waited.
She landed flat, expecting gunfire which didn’t come. The fireaxe skittered from her grasp, and came to rest a few feet away.
“Louisa?”
“Still here.”
“That was your last chance.”
“Toss the gun over here. That’ll knock a few years off your sentence.”
There was definitely a helicopter, and it was definitely getting nearer.
“You aren’t armed, Louisa. This won’t end well.”
The fireaxe had given that away. Nobody with a gun would have come hefting a heavy blade.
Which lay outside the range of her shelter. She stretched for it, and this time he did shoot: missing her hand but hitting the axe handle, making it spin wildly. She yelped.
“Louisa? Are you hurt?”
She didn’t reply.
The steady whump-whump of the helicopter blades grew louder. If the pilot saw an armed man, he wouldn’t land; he’d go whumping away … She had to show him Pashkin had a gun. If Min were here, he’d tell her what a stupid plan that was, but Min wasn’t here because he was dead, and if she didn’t do something now, the man who’d killed him would be whisked off. The axe might come in useful. She reached for it again, and a heavy boot crunched onto her hand.
She looked up into Pashkin’s eyes. He glared back, genuinely irritated that she was putting him to this trouble. In one hand he held a cloth bag, swollen to the size of a football. Lot of diamonds.
In the other he held the gun, aimed straight at her head.
“I’m sorry, Louisa,” he said. “Really I am.”
Then Marcus shot him, and Pashkin, gun and bag of diamonds dropped, though only the diamonds went scattering this way and that, like small bright marbles in a children’s game; some of them tumbling to the edge of the roof, and over.
Louisa could only imagine what that must have been like—tiny glass raindrops falling onto distant streets, while the whump-whump of the helicopter blades beat the air into slender nothings.
